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What the Boss Wants from You

AST AUTUMN I was invited to

sit in on a meeting of a group

called the G50, which comprises

youngish executives who report

to a CEO and who might legitimately

aspire to be a CEO. Larry Bossidy was

there with them. Ive known Larry for

more than 15 years, from when he was

vice chairman of General Electric, then

as CEO of AlliedSignal, and now in hishighly productive retirement. Once

when I was interviewing him, I con-

fessed to having forgotten what work-

ing capital is. Larry positively lit up,

scooted around his desk, grabbed a

piece of paper, and taught me. He is like

that; hes a loosen-your-tie-and-lets-fix-this kind of guy.

With the G50 group, Larry shared what he described as the

compact between a boss and a direct report. The compact is

about behavior, not character traits. As far as hes concerned,

such traits as integrity and fairness are so important that they

are table stakes, and leadership thinkers need to focus more

on the reciprocal actions between a leader and a follower. He

got right down to business: If I were your boss, he said,

here are eight behaviors I would expect of you. Then he

went on, And here is what I think you should expect from your

leader. Ive never seen a group of executives react as we did.

Every one of us bent over our notebooks, writing furiously, as

if a professor had said, Here is what will be on the exam; you

might want to write it down.

A couple of days later, I wrote Larry and suggested we de-

velop his talk into an article. He said yes; senior editor Ellen

Peebles said yes, too. The result, What Your Leader Expects

of You, is the lead article in this issue. You dont have to write

down what he said because Larry did it for you. But it will be

on the exam.

At AlliedSignal, Bossidy was one of the first big-company

CEOs to experiment with the then-newfangled notion of pro-

cess management: the idea that horizontal processes (such as

the sequence of steps from accepting an order to fulfilling it)

could be managed just as functions are and, indeed, that com-

panies might even be managed along process lines.

Process management has come a long way since then, and

no one has played a greater role in its development than

Michael Hammer. The Process Audit, Hammers article in this

issue, is a major advance in the field. For

the last five years, Hammer has been

working with a consortium of compa-

nies to develop a framework for creating

and sustaining high-performance pro-

cesses. How, the group asked, can

process management move beyond ex-

perimentation, anecdote, and lessons

learned to become a more fully grown

management discipline? The answerHammer and his colleagues developed,

and then tested on themselves, is a

maturity model, which allows com-

panies to evaluate business processes

in terms of specific attributes of their

design, management, staffing, mea-

surement systems, and infrastructure. The result of a process

audit is, first, that business leaders can truly and objectively

understand how capable a given process is and where the pro-

cess is strong and where weak. Second, of course, a process

audit is a blueprint for change and improvement. The road to

process management is essentially unmapped, Hammer told

me last summer. No more.

Every organization walks strategic fine lines. At HBR, we try

to balance timeliness and timelessness. That is, we want to

help you solve your toughest problems, the ones vexing you

now, but we want to do so by publishing work of tested and

enduring value. To support that goal, we and the McKinsey

Foundation honor the best article published in HBR each year,

as determined by a panel of distinguished judges from the ac-

ademic and business worlds. For 2006, the 48th McKinsey

Award goes to Strategy and Society: The Link Between Com-

petitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility by

Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer, with Gary Hamels The

Why, What, and How of Management Innovation as runner-

up. You can read about these articles on page 53. Even better,

you can read the articles themselves in 2006s December and

February issues, and subscribers can read them online at

www.hbr.org.

L

Thomas A. Stewart

14 Harvard Business Review | April 2007 | hbr.org

FROM THE EDITOR

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